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Comment by vampirechicken | Hacker News Reader

So am I the only person seeing a Democrats (Big Goverment services) way of doing things vs a Republicans (multiple layers of crony capitalists contractors) in the comparison of the efficacy of Narwhal Vs Orca?

I can't be the only one?

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Didn't the latest Ars article suggest Orca wasn't a contractor concoction after all? [1]

I think all we really see, is that the Obama campaign had experience and no primary campaign distractions.

The Obama campaign had a v1 in 2008 and were merely updating it for 2012. Yes, they had to figure in mobile and the enhanced scale of the problem, but they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008.

The Obama campaign also had a (comparatively) leisurely opportunity to implement and refine their system while the Republican primary battles raged on and any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development of a national campaign tool.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

they were starting from a significantly better place than the GOP, who were caught completely flat-footed on technology in 2008

Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?

But the national party could have started working on this 08 and just sold/licensed the tech to the campaign after the nominee was selected....

I think that just hits on a larger organizational problem that seems to be common to both national parties: A staggering amount of the services and resources that I would think the state/national party would build up and have on-hand, they simply don't appear to have. (To say nothing of the coordination they don't seem to have)

e.g. Obama wasn't building/running a DNC-wide system and sharing it with all the candidates. His campaign built it on their own, for their one race and now-built, all indications are that it's going to be wound-down or morphed into a citizen mobilization sort of effort to drive "call your congressman"-type efforts.

Maybe political campaigning laws prohibit massive transfers of 'property' like that. I don't know. But it doesn't even sound like the DNC is looking to build their own system to share with future candidates.

And perhaps political campaign laws prohibit the national party from transferring down that much assistance to local races. That, I also don't know. I don't even know if, say, the GOP could legally lock up a sweet bulk price for buying signage/buttons/tshirts/etc and act as cheaper-middleman for their candidates.

There seems to be a hard line between each campaign and the rest of the organization and that leaves each campaign is largely 'on their own' for anything other than maybe lining up endorsements or speaking dates to get friendly faces to show up for local campaign events.

As I understand it, a lot of the infrastructure is contained in private companies (some non-profit, some not) closely associated with one of the two parties and available to all the campaigns associated with that party.

For instance, the Democratic Party's contact databases are in NGP VAN's VoteBuilder or in Catalist, and campaigns in 2014 will both be using the information entered there in 2012 and updating the contact information for the next race. Much of the Democratic Party's institutional knowledge about voter contact and outreach lives at the non-profit Analyst Institute. The insights gained in the 2012 campaign will stay there instead of evaporating.

The Republican Party has a little of this - there's the GOP Data Center, formerly Voter Vault - but they haven't been building infrastructure as aggressively as the Democratic Party, and it's costing them. In 2004 the GOP had a superior technical organization, but they seemed to rest on their laurels, and in 2008 they were slightly weaker. In 2012 they were totally lapped.

They will do better by 2016 - thanks in part to the utter failure of ORCA - but the Democrats have built up a pretty healthy infrastructure lead that'll be hard to top.

"Shouldn't the GOP have been funding an Orca-like system starting in 2008? I mean, how many elections does the other guy have to deploy superior technology to great effect before you start making your own better tech?"

The GOP probably leveraged a Orca-like system, sold the hardware and outsourced the software for a short term profit gain.

That doesn't explain nor excuse the fact that Orca was launched the day of the election when the Narwhal team was practicing with severe outage scenarios a month before that, preparing for the worst.

I think there's a deeper story here.... Politics -good or bad - tends to attract people with strong political views.

I mean how many brilliant (ex.)far-right, feminist vegans would work on a campaign for a left-of-center, sexist-"I love to eat nearly-extinct Northern Finnish deer" candidate?

The bigger question is why the Obama campaign was able to attract this level of engineering/technical talent.

I'm sure these individuals were not in want of a job.

I'm not sure how persuasive the argument "any one potential GOP candidate was denied the money/focus to start the development" is.

According to the GOP and the Fox News machine, the only people who supported Mssr. Obama were maxists-femi-nazi-pro-baby-killers and/or illegals who were offered free, student-loan forgiveness (not that they could ever get into Swarthmore or Reed or MIT without affirmative action)....or free cheese.

Either that or marvelously agile illegals who took a pass on self-deportation (the New Black Panther Party let them vote anyway).

But alas, I digress here....

I'm by no means unbiased myself. I think the 2 party political hegemony in the USA is a relic of the past.

You could twist that the other way, though. The Democratic organization was highly decentralized, leaner and more effective than the Romney campaign bloc, centralized and huge in Boston HQ.

It was also fault tolerant. In 2008, at least, Democrats had paper backup for things that went wrong with the tech, and did end up using it at times.

In 2012, Republicans hadn't done any due diligence and assumed their tech would work. So sure they were that their tech would work is that they only released it to users on Election Day itself...

Indeed, and frankly I think the US dodged a bullet in that respect. I've always been interested in politics and have a belief that there's a strong correlation between the way the campaign goes and the way governance would go if the candidate is elected.

Decentralization is really the key thing, not whether the work is done by the government versus contractors. The government can be very efficient doing things in-house as long as the efforts are decentralized. The US Attorneys Offices handle tremendous caseloads for their staffing levels relative to private law firms. The Army Corps of Engineers is also quite effective because it's decentralized.

Things that are a mess are often centralized and involve too many contractors. Defense, the VA, etc.

Orca wasn't built by contractors, it was written in-house by Romney staffers and volunteers.

See: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

Orca and systems like it are also not particularly relevant to electoral outcomes, compared to all of the other things that campaigns use/build.

No kidding - ORCA should've been miles down the priority queue. That tens of thousands of election-day volunteers were wasted on it when they could've been doing more essential things is infuriating.

The Romney campaign didn't build the right thing wrong - instead, they built the completely wrong thing, which is doubly damning.

This makes a case for a small government. A small team, in house, tightly managed worked very well. Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about.

You're conflating multiple different things. You can have big government without multiple layers of contractors. E.g. the federal court/prosecutors offices are a pretty huge operation in the aggregate, but it's all distributed so each office or court individually is small and lean.

At the same time, one of the ways to get "small government" has historically been to outsource as much as possible to contractors. That's why the military industrial complex looks the way it does.

Or it makes the case that the goverment should do things inhouse instead of outsourcing everything and having hordes of contractors.

> Real big government is the multiple layers of crony contractors you're talking about. That's entirely the opposite of that the GOP means when they say Big Government. They mean large offices of government employees. They demonstrate a love of having a few contract managers and a slew of corny contractors.

I lol'd that Romney got his Orca app from Best Buy.

"Most of the Romney organization's core IT operations, such as desktop support and back-office systems, were outsourced to Best Buy subsidiary MindShift Technologies"

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/which-...

That is not necessarily bad though, MindShift properly has a lot more experience in that area and the tech support is likely the same as what they normally sell. Orca (and Narwhale) on the other hand -- they are more of a once in a lifetime app.

I think that this is a stretch since 2012 was the first time they brought the technologists in-house.

Nice discussion. Thanks folks.

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